


How not to adopt a child

by LadyStorm



Category: Doctor Who, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Literally the worst possible parenting material
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26544052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyStorm/pseuds/LadyStorm
Summary: This only really makes sense in context of the challenge and requires some knowledge of Doctor Who
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	How not to adopt a child

Emergency teleports were useful things, but they did have their drawbacks. For instance, right now he was stranded, on a distant world in a distant galaxy, one far from the reaches of his own people and even beyond the limits of where he would normally be able to contact them. Furthermore, from what he had seen so far, the technology here wasn’t up to the standard required to get him home, and the planet itself seemed pre-occupied with tearing itself apart in some sort of civil war.  
For most people, these would have been insurmountable problems. But then, most people weren’t Davros.  
Davros was intimately familiar with wars. He had grown up in one, one that had torn his planet apart and forced his to develop his children, the Daleks, in order to secure his own people’s survival. Since then, almost every planet he had been on had either been embroiled in a war, or was utterly devastated and lifeless after losing one. Usually, it was him that had started it, and compared to some of those conflicts, this one was positively tame. And it would be a cold day in hell before there was any piece of technology that was so primitive he, with all his genius, could not find a use for it.  
All he had to do was find the technology, and preferably someone to help his adapt it to his needs. In this shattered landscape, there would most likely be someone hiding around. He simply needed to find them.

-

The plan was complicated when the first people he found were a group of humanoid children.  
It had been a long time since Davros had any direct contact with children. His Daleks didn’t have a childhood as such, being born and raised in tanks, and by the time the were decanted into their armour, they were fully fledged murderous soldiers. Children, Davros knew, were unlikely to be of any use to him, and the most logical course would be to simply kill this group and move on, but something made him hesitate. Perhaps, he thought, is was simply to do with the obvious skill and familiarity with which they handled their weapons, but there were memories, old ones buried in the back of his mind of his own childhood on he battlefields of Skaro that scratched at the back of his mind for the first time in years.  
For their part, the children stared back at him, obviously not expecting to meet a one armed, shrivelled, wheelchair bound creature and being uncertain on what to do next.  
The stand off was broken when shots were fired at their little group, and Davros and the children, by accident of geography, found themselves on the same side. The weapons, Davros noted with contempt, were pathetic, laser based affairs, far inferior to the energy weapons he had armed his Daleks with and no match at all for the force field built into his chair. The children noticed this fairly quickly, and organised themselves inside this protected perimeter before firing back. Though their weapons were equally pathetic, it didn’t take long before the group of adults that had ambushed them had been fended off, retreating or falling dead to the ground.  
Davros watched all this with interest. Perhaps, he reasoned, these children would not be so useless after all.

-

The planet, the children told him, was named Melidia/Daan, after the two factions fighting over it. The children represented a third faction, one trying to topple the other two. Davros would have written their efforts off as futile, but had to admit to a grudging respect for the fact they had yet to be wiped out. Their leaders were fairly shrewd for ones so young, they were his only allies, and there was no fight that could not be won when aided by his superior scientific intellect.  
The deal he made with the group was fairly simple. In exchange for his help in constructing better weapons and shields, they would provide him with technology and assistance construct a means of getting home. It benefitted both parties, and saved a lot of effort for Davros.

-

The laboratory Davros built was rudimentary, located in the tunnels under a burned out city and filled with any scraps of weapons and technology the children could bring him. It reminded him painfully of those last days, under his own city, before the Kaleds fell and his Daleks triumphed.  
He had been right about the technology. These primitives seemed not to have even grasped that Teleportation was possible, let alone the complex space time travel that the Daleks took for granted. For all that, Davros believed he would be able to construct a communication device from the rubble, as well as a time corridor to return him to Skaro.  
From the odd comments he heard, the weapons he provided in return seemed to be winning the fight for the children, but he paid this little heed. He had far more important things to be thinking on. There help was something of a mixed blessing. Davros himself had only one hand, and was confined to a life support chair, so aby able bodied assistance he could get sped up the construction of his devices, but the for the most part the children knew little of the intricacies of technology. The most skilled, and therefore his most common lab assistant, was a small red haired child who showed some slight promise as a scientist, and therefore he worked in Davros’s laboratory when he wasn’t leading battles.  
For the most part, this was satisfactory, though there were some slight problems, such as the instance when Davros discovered his Lab assistant collapsed on the floor. “Sorry,” The little creature had said, when he awoke to find Davros glowering down at him. “I think I forgot to eat. Or sleep.” Considering there was little enough food and the creature was fighting a war as well as assisting Davros, this was unsurprising, but, “You are no use to me exhausted.” Davros snapped. “I can’t have mistakes. Go rest, and make sure this doesn’t happen again.”  
His Lab assistant looked puzzled for a moment, before nodding and scuttling off. Davros dismissed the incident, and went back to his work.

-

His communication array and the time corridor were developing apace. This was helped significantly by the fact that the children now seemed to have won the war, and his Lab assistant was now sending rather longer helping him. The boy had also taken to talking to Davros, and though this first had been annoying, it surprised the scientist how soon it became mere background noise. Sometimes, he even found himself listening to it, such as the time his Lad assistant had been talking of the problems the surviving Melidia/ Daan were posing to the new administration.  
“Kill them.” Davros told him, absently, sorting though some wiring. His lab assistant looked shocked.  
“No!” He exclaimed, horrified. “They can’t! I mean, those are their families.”  
“So?” Davros replied, absently. “They were fighting a war against them. Killing them stops it happening again. Strength and power. I gave you the weapons for it.”  
The boy still looked appalled. “They can’t.” He insisted, “They have to try and repair things between them. Compassion, understanding, so they can build for the future.”  
Davros thought about telling him that compassion and understanding were foolish, were weaknesses that would get him killed in the end, but as he suspected that compassion was one of the only reasons his lab assistant continued to help him, poor crippled old man as he appeared, it would not serve his purpose. Instead he observed, “You talk about them as though you are not one of them."  
For a moment, the boy looked anguished. Then, self control smoothing his face, he replied. “I’m not. I came here with … someone else. I stayed to help they young. I’m … on my own.”  
Davros paused for a moment, old memories, long buried from his own childhood once again itching a the back of his mind. He knew, too well, what it was to be alone on a battlefield, surrounded by people who could never understand you, though in his case it had been his genius that had set him apart. The boy could never be Davros’s equal in that, though under Davros’s hard tutelage, he was becoming quite the scientist. He had already had the intelligence and the creativity, and had just needed the training to use them properly.  
He thought, briefly, about the only other person in the cosmos he had ever considered his equal. Ka Faraq Gatri had long since proved himself to be a brilliant scientist and a formidable strategist and also quite, quite mad. He was the only true enemy his Daleks had, and though this obviously meant that the Time Lord must be destroyed, Davros, despite himself, occasionally liked their company, and often wished that they were on the same side. Ka Faraq Gatri was the most dangerous person Davros had ever known, and yet he had expressed and displayed the same weaknesses as his Lab assistant for compassion and kindness.  
The Doctor, Davros thought wryly, would probably like his Lab Assistant.

-

The time corridor was nearing completion, and his communication device was functioning. Soon, Davros would be off this rock and back to taking over the universe.  
It was a pity, he thought, that it would be impractical to take his Lab assistant with him. The boy was getting quite skilled, and though he would obviously never be the equal of his perfect Daleks, it was quite nice have company that possessed both opposable thumbs and opinions of their own. He found himself wishing, idly, that the boy was a Dalek, but he had engineered his children to be above such paltry emotions and weaknesses that the boy possessed, though Davros did have to admit the boys ingenuity would be a credit to his Dalek scientist, who occasionally lacked creativity and imagination.  
He ruthlessly quashed the old, faded memories that reminded the boy of himself, back when he was young.  
“What will you do?” He asked his Lab assistant, as they finished the wiring on the communications console, “when I am gone?”  
The boy looked sad. It was odd, Davros thought, because no right minded person should miss his company.  
“I … don’t know.” The boy confessed. “The young have got control of Melidia/Daan, thanks to your weapons.” He gave Davros a grateful smile, something that had never happened to him before. It was, he mused, an odd experience. “They don’t need me.” The boy continued. “I’m … alone.”  
Davros considered him. The sensible thing, he knew, would be to kill the boy, as well as activate the self destruct in all the weapons he had provided, to stop superior Dalek science falling into he wrong hands. But…  
“Can’t you return home?” He asked, instead. The boy looked ashamed.  
“I don’t think they would take me back.” He admitted. “And I can’t contact them."  
Davros hesitated, reminding himself again hat his Lab assistant wasn’t his concern, as much as he sometimes stirred the memories of his childhood. Eventually, he replied, “When I have used it, you may use the communication panel to contact them.”  
It couldn’t hurt, he reasoned. The boy was brilliant, but not brilliant enough to ever pose a threat to the Daleks. Just this once, he could let someone go.  
He didn’t know what he felt about the look of gratitude the boy sent him, other than it made him feel strangely warm.

-

The communication device had worked, his Daleks were set to receive him, and the time corridor was completed. This was good.  
What was less good was the humanoid who had turned up in his lab. Apparently, this was his lab assistants guardian, and it was immediately apparent that he didn’t deserve the boy, judging by the way the man humanoid was shouting.  
Also apparent was the fact that the man had abandoned the boy in the middle of a battlefield, and this was making it quite hard for Davros to think clearly.  
Davros didn’t cling to his memories, he couldn’t. He was not the same boy who had survived on the battlefield of Skaro, he was the genius who had created the Daleks, his perfect Daleks, that would one day rule the universe, but sometimes that boys memories were hard to ignore, and being alone on the battlefield, surrounded by mines, abandoned and alone, was one memory that was hard to get rid of.  
But Ka Faraq Gatri had come for him. The Doctor, despite knowing what he was, what he would do, had chosen to come back and save him, and this man, this man had seen his Lab assistant on the battlefield, and had chosen to leave him there.  
The man grabbed his Lab Assistants arm and pulled, and something in Davros snapped.  
The man didn’t react when Davros raised a hand, not expecting any danger from a crippled scientist. When he did see the lightning crackling from Davros’s hand, he twisted himself around, pulling out a laser sword from his belt, but it was too late. Davros had created the Daleks, and Davros had made his weapons to destroy them.  
The man’s body collapsed to the ground, and Davros’s lab assistant was backing away in terror. “Sith lightning” He said, and Davros didn’t know what sith lightning was, didn’t care, because he was too busy trying to work out what to do next, because he clearly couldn’t leave the boy here.  
He couldn’t keep him, either. The boy was too kind, to compassionate, and his Daleks would inevitably kill him in the end. But-  
The Doctor had saved his life as a child. The Doctor had spoken of mercy. And the Doctor, Davros thought, would like the boy. And considering how they inevitably ended up fighting each other, Davros would probably be able to keep track of the boy, watch him develop.  
“Come, Boy,” He said, seizing the boy’s arm and ignoring his struggles to get away. “We are leaving.”  
When the Jedi order arrived to look for their missing master, all they found was a lot of inexplicably destroyed technology in the hands of some very confused children, some sort of portal in a basement and a burnt corpse on the floor.

-

Message received by the Tardis, orbiting Proxima Centauri,

Doctor,

Though I have lately been missing, it should grieve you to know that the Daleks are once more set to take over the universe with my guidance and aid. Especially as I have a new Lab Assistant. Though the boy is far too weak and compassionate, he will soon be cured of that under the care of my Daleks, as it is completely impossible for anyone to rescue him from the Dalek research vessel in the Vogar System. The one behind the large asteroid.

Davros.

**Author's Note:**

> This happened by accident.  
> Background information, Davros is an evil mad scientist who created the Daleks from Doctor who, and Ka Faraq Gatri is a Dalek name for the Dontor


End file.
